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My parents were constantly afraid they would lose their jobs. The idea that we were always a paycheck away from disaster was drilled into me.

Gary Shteyngart

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Gary Shteyngart
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: July 5
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
St. Petersburg
Loses
Parent
Idea
Drilled
Jobs
Disaster
Away
Constantly
Ideas
Afraid
Always
Parents
Would
Lose

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My parents were kind enough to spend hours talking to me.
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One should learn from a book. Books have a lot to teach us. They have a lot of empathy to impart to us, but they should also be fun. This stuff is fun! You shouldn't pick up a book and say, Oh my god, I'm gonna better myself by reading this. You may better yourself by reading this, but who cares? Just have fun.
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The radio station was playing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, a sure sign that things were much worse than they appeared.
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Good fiction makes me turn off all the other parts of my brain, so that I become quiet and submissive, entirely at the mercy of the work at hand.
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I felt the weakness of these books, their immateriality, how they had failed to change the world, and I didn't want to sully myself with their weakness anymore.
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I don't have many possessions, apart from my books.
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If my mother hadn't tried to sell me chicken Kiev cutlets for $1.40 after I graduated from college, maybe I would've been the lawyer she wanted me to be.
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freedom is anathema to dreams nurtured in captivity.
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Alcohol causes a lot of problems, and then to solve these problems, you drink more.
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Asthmatic immigrant learns to breathe by writing.
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